Oracle Takes Business Intelligence to New Level with BI 11g

The latest version of Oracle's BI platform offers integration with a wide variety of IT environments and data sources.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) today unveiled Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, promising greater ease of use and performance for end users as they wring value out of a wide range of corporate data.

Oracle claims its new business intelligence software offering is the only unified environment for accessing and analyzing data that resides in relational, OLAP and XML data sources. Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence, said Oracle BI 11g can "fit into whatever IT environment and lay on top of existing data sources."

Users get a new integrated scorecard application and enterprise reporting, visualization, search and collaboration features. Oracle is also promising improved performance, scalability and security through deeper integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and other Oracle Fusion Middleware components.

Using the common enterprise information model, Oracle says BI 11g is the first solution to unify Relational OLAP (R-OLAP), Multidimensional OLAP (M-OLAP) and enterprise reporting on a common technology foundation. Improved OLAP analysis capabilities help users access and navigate hierarchical data stored in Oracle Essbase and relational data sources from a common interface.

A new thin-client report design editor allows for both interactive, Web-based reports and production reports, while Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management lets users track metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with business strategy and goals. The new Action Framework lets users initiate an action, such as a business process or Web service, directly from their dashboard.

Oracle also offers a number of prebuilt analytical applications for Oracle and non-Oracle applications, including SAP. The applications span finance, HR, marketing, sales, service, order management and supply chain management.

Oracle also promises fast and easy upgrades for current customers, with no effect on existing reports or metadata migration.